To the editor:

In response to Tim Kelly’s Jan. 26 letter about Marx, I wouldn’t say it is a “documented FACT” that “socialism as professed by Marx and Engels is an utter failure.”

Surely some positive aspects can be attributed to socialist forms of government. Nothing is ever black or white. The Cold War made it difficult to develop a balanced outlook on life in socialist countries.

I would modify Mr. Kelly’s statement to “socialism has failed in the past.” This statement is broad enough to account for the possibility that some form of socialism might succeed in the future.

Then to be fair, we would have to eliminate Cuba from our list of failed socialist systems. The United States has been so instrumental in devastating Cuba’s economy through sanctions that it may be hard to isolate socialism’s effects in this case.

The authoritarian structures of most forms of communism and socialism witnessed to date are problematic because they reproduce the state they intended to overthrow.

However, if one’s concern is for the elite power’s control over needs and production, it would make sense to broaden the critique to include capitalism. In the capitalist system, employing elites determine both needs and the rate of production. They determine what we need to know and call it news. They decide what is okay to add to our foodstuffs and call it healthy. They pay for two political parties that look more and more like one.

To avoid the abuses of power in both communism and capitalism, I would suggest opting for the development of an alternative such as social ecology. This discipline offers a critical analysis of both social hierarchy and domination. It attempts to form “a coherent, radical, critique of current anti-ecological trends” and offers “a reconstructive, communitarian and ethical approach to social life.”

Its founder, Murray Bookchin, has summed up its politics in the statement, “From each according to his or her ability to each according to his or her need according to the social resources available and decided upon democratically.”

While this sounds like Marx, it has been modified to incorporate an egalitarian, face-to-face democratic structure at the local level.

As for Marx, I agree that it is unwise to elevate him to the status of hero. Neither his deterministic interpretation of history nor his self-deprecating anti-Semitism are much worth emulating.

However, I believe it is important for those committed to the cause of freedom to cultivate an understanding of Marx’s striking critique of capitalism and elaborate upon it.

I am slow to accuse Marx of laziness. Das Kapital is a thick book, and it must have taken lots of effort to put it together. If one wishes to accuse anyone of parasitism, focus on the wealthy. Why not target the top 1 percent of American households who own more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent of us combined?

Or better yet, target “the top 358 billionaires who are worth the combined income of 45 percent of the planet’s population, the 2.5 billion people on the bottom” (“Industrial Workers of the World 1998”). Enjoy your breakfast, comrades.

Michael Pitula

Senior

Environmental science and Spanish